By Professor John Holmwood and Dr Layla Aitlhadj

The Shawcross Report on Prevent, the pre-crime arm of the counter-terrorism strategy, was published on 8^th February. It had been heavily leaked to right-wing media over the previous six months and the government immediately accepted all 34 recommendations.

The People’s Review of Prevent published its own report over a year ago, and this week we published our response to the Shawcross Report. Together with over 200 civil liberties groups (including Liberty, Amnesty International, Child Rights International Network and the Runnymede Trust), community organizations and experts, we have called for the Shawcross Report to be withdrawn and a moratorium on the implementation of its recommendations.

The report is poorly argued and poorly evidenced. Central components of Prevent are left undiscussed – for example, there is no discussion of the Commission for Countering Extremism despite recommending a fundamental change to its role – and central parts of its delivery go unnoticed. For example, community cohesion projects have been delivered under the Building a Stronger Britain Together (BSBT) umbrella since 2016 and were subject to comprehensive evaluation in 2019 and 2021. Instead, the Shawcross Report relies on evaluations of a small number of projects prior to BSBT and published in 2017.

The report represents a clear danger to civil liberties – especially of Muslim citizens – with no discernible contribution to public safety. The ‘extremist’ ideas to which it is directed are all lawful expressions of political and religious views.

It proposes that Muslim civil society organisations should be subject to evaluation and certification by a unit – a reconfigured Commission for Countering Extremism – within the Home Office. It also recommends that this unit be responsible for directing Prevent across all government departments and down to regional commissioners where Prevent panels would be removed from the responsibility of local authorities.

It also proposes that there should be an enhanced role of the security services and counter-terrorism police within Prevent and that it should be re-focused on ‘Islamist’ extremism and away from right-wing extremism. This is clearly discriminatory. Moreover, the data shows that a higher proportion of right-wing referrals are adopted onto the Channel de-radicalisation programme than referrals for Islamist extremism. This reflects the current judgements of counter-terrorism officers since they are more fully involved at later stages in the process.

Finally, it proposes that Prevent should have greater concern for public safety. This it describes as moving away from a concern with safeguarding vulnerable individuals, treating those who are referred under Prevent instead as susceptible to radicalisation. Those who exhibit vulnerabilities without a clear ideological orientation should be considered under other support services.

Logically, however, this would lead to a recommendation that the Prevent duty be withdrawn from schooling and from health services. Indeed, we show that more people are referred from Prevent to the health services than from health services to Prevent, while around 29% of referrals are of children under the age of 15, with the median age of referrals from the education sector being 14.

Don’t take our word for it. Rarely can a report and its recommendations have been so quickly undermined by other official reports that followed on its heels.

For example, the Shawcross report declares that high profile terrorist cases show that Prevent has been a failure and requires reinforcement. He draws upon evidence presented to the Manchester Arena Inquiry (MAI) to argue that Salman Abedi should have been identified under Prevent and that a campaign against Prevent at Salford University was a material factor in explaining why they were not. But the final report of the MAI did not conclude that Salman Abedi could have been identified from school or university. Moreover, it laid the blame with the security services and policing who were already investigating Salman Abedi prior to the bombing.

In short, the Shawcross Review recommends an enhanced role in Prevent for the security services and counter-terrorism police, just when the MAI report has called for a rigorous and urgent review of their role.

The Shawcross Report argues that Prevent should address ‘susceptibilities’, not vulnerabilities. Bear in mind that no-one involved in Prevent has acted unlawfully or indicated an intention to do so. The Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, published his annual report for 2021 a few weeks after the Shawcross Report. He proposed that children and young people who have committed terrorism offences (usually non-violent offences) should be treated as ‘vulnerable’, rather than as responsible agents.

Finally, Baroness Louise Casey delivered her damning review of the Metropolitan Police, finding it guilty of institutional misogyny, homophobia and racism. The latter was evident in how it utilised stop and search, of which Prevent is a variant. The Metropolitan Police has national responsibility for counter-terrorism. The Shawcross Report blithely proposes that too many people fear reporting ‘Islamist’ extremism under Prevent for fear of being considered racist, but does so just at the moment that institutional racism is shown to be embedded in the very service recommended to counter ‘anti-racism’ bias in Prevent.

A moratorium on the recommendations of the Shawcross Report is urgent and necessary. It declares itself in support of liberal values, but proposes that critics of Prevent should be ‘disrupted’.  One paragraph is ominous. He states, “the campaign against Prevent has included some civil liberties groups and activists who seemingly, as a matter of principle, oppose a state-run scheme to counter specific ideas, attitudes, and non-criminal behaviours, no matter how light touch the scheme’s methods.” (para 6.250)

Prevent is far from light-touch. But a ‘state-run’ scheme to counter ideas and attitudes that are not themselves unlawful is explicitly illiberal and authoritarian. Civicus Monitor recently demoted the UK in its freedom rankings. The implementation of the Shawcross recommendations would represent a further deterioration.

Professor John Holmwood is emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Nottingham. Dr Layla Aitlhadj is Director and Senior Case Worker at Prevent Watch. Together, they are co-directors of the People’s Review of Prevent.

Image: https://www.thebluediamondgallery.com/handwriting/p/prevent.html.